


Escape Velocity

by pendrecarc



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-31
Updated: 2016-07-31
Packaged: 2018-07-26 12:05:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,179
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7573399
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pendrecarc/pseuds/pendrecarc
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <em>That is how you become lost, when you admit that you are trying to escape from a level you don't believe belongs to you. When you dream, one level to the next, you must always choose the level you dream in.</em>
</p><p>Mal fulfills a promise, but it proves more complicated than she could have expected.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Escape Velocity

**Author's Note:**

  * For [cordialcount](https://archiveofourown.org/users/cordialcount/gifts).
  * Inspired by [A Battery of Signals](https://archiveofourown.org/works/784380) by [cordialcount](https://archiveofourown.org/users/cordialcount/pseuds/cordialcount). 



> The quote in the summary is from cordialcount's [A Battery of Signals](http://archiveofourown.org/works/784380). This is a direct sequel to that fic.

The floor beneath them is flat, endless, polished smooth; the sky above is an unvarying matte grey. Mal’s heels ought to tap out a rhythm on the mirrored surface, but they produce no sound at all.

“What is this place?” Phillipa’s voice falls thin and tinny on her mind’s ear.

Mal stares out toward the distant horizon, the place where the floor and sky come together like the moment between sleep and waking. She itches to fill this space, to send mountains shooting up to pierce the sky, to summon waves to roll across the floor at her feet. Her heart beats hard in her throat. “That is not important.”

“Of course it is. The dreamscape is vital.” The girl sounds like she’s parroting something learned by rote. She probably is. Mal wonders who she found to teach her. If she and Dom had her from the beginning, they could have worked wonders.

The reminder of how much Phillipa has to learn, of why they are here in the first place, anchors her to the moment. “Not for a forger, not for what you want to do. Ignore it.” Mal centers herself, aware of the body she wears here but just as mindful as she can be of her true body. It lies still, waiting for her return, blood pumping the drugs through her veins. And she has a job to do. “Look down.”

They both do, gazing at the curious flattened reflections of their chins and noses, the eyes looming up from below.

Mal smiles. The twin of her mouth quirks back. “Now walk away, like this.”

Mal takes three steps and leaves her reflection behind. As Phillipa gasps, it spins in place, flinging its arms wide. Mal puts a reflexive hand out to take Dom’s. It closes on empty air.

***

She doesn’t need to tell him what she has been doing. He doesn’t even need to see the marks on her wrist. Dom looks into her face and knows.

“You’re sure?” he asks that evening as they prepare dinner. “Is it safe?”

“When is it ever _safe_?” Mal wants to laugh and would do it, too, if she couldn’t see the edge of real fear in his eyes, if she wasn’t so aware of the distance that still remains between them. They are closing that gap, will close it eventually, she believes this, but moments before she picked up a knife to slice a tomato, and Dom’s corner of the room went still and breathless. “I can bring her here,” Mal offers instead. “If you’re ready.”

She grasps the tomato, firm and cool against her fingertips, and begins to slice.

“Not yet,” he says when she is done. Mal sets down the knife and his whole body relaxes; she walks over to press a kiss to his forehead and he lets his face drop into her shoulder, muffling his voice so she can’t be certain whether he is fighting back tears. “Not here. Mal, I dreamed we raised them in this house,” he says, and she strokes his hair.

***

They return time and again to that spare and unchanging dreamscape. Mal tells Phillipa this is because she needs a space free of distractions to learn. Mal knows it is really because once she herself starts to build, to create, to take reality in her hands and twist, she is not at all sure she’ll be able to stop.

Phillipa’s reflection dances on the other side of the mirrored floor while the girl looks on in fierce concentration. Mal has spun off three reflections of her own, easy as breath. One of the copies has tossed away her shoes. It walks around underneath the dreamers, bare soles pressing upward.

“When will I be able to make them talk?” Phillipa asks.

“Patience.” This is a good reminder for Mal as well. Patience, with Dom and with herself. They are all making progress.

Another of her own upside-down reflections sits on the floor, skirt tucked decorously under its knees. Beside it the top spins, another reflection. Mal watches it turning, turning, the tip jutting upward toward the grey sky.

Just before they wake, Phillipa asks her about Limbo. Mal does not want to talk about it, but the girl presses her. “How deep were you when you fell in?”

“Three levels down,” Mal says. She and Dom had gone that deep before and had come out successfully. It was pure bad luck, the one time they did not. Reckless experimentation or calculated risk—it all depended on whom you were asking.

Phillipa’s bravado slips when she asks questions like this. She is too passionately curious to keep the mask up, and underneath it Mal sometimes sees a fleeting expression she knows she’s seen before. Is it an echo of Dom she sees there? Of herself? She shies away from that thought, circles back to it. If there is a resemblance, it should not come as a surprise. Forge someone so long, so successfully, and you may bring something of them back to the waking world.

“What were the dreams like?”

Mal starts, too lost in thought to follow the conversation back. “What?”

“The three levels,” Phillipa says. “What were the dreamscapes like?”

Mal shakes her head, looking away from those too-familiar eyes. “That is not important.”

***

Dom sits at the kitchen table with his wedding ring between his hands. He gives a jerk of his fingers and sets it to spinning for the space of a few breaths, then reaches to halt it in its path. Then he whirls it back into motion, repeats. The only sound is the rhythmic thrumming of metal against polished wood.

Mal wonders how long he has been sitting there, doing this. She walks up to place her hand flat over the ring. It settles under her palm, and Dom closes his eyes.

A minute passes, then another. She lifts her hand and goes to start dinner. At length he joins her, but it’s left to Mal to break the silence. “I don’t like the thought of you alone here all day.”

“I see them sometimes,” he says. It’s all she can do not to drop the bowl she is holding, to keep her back carefully turned so he won’t see her face. “Just in glimpses. Outside the window, playing in the yard.”

When she speaks, her voice is steady. “That never happened.”

“I know,” he replies. “I just can’t believe it.”

***

Phillipa learns to part with her reflection, to send it running off wherever she chooses. Mal begins to show her how to manage multiples. Making them is not so hard, once you have the feel of it. The difficulty is to give such life to them that they move independently, each seeming to have a will of its own. The girl struggles with this, loses concentration. She has six of them, now, and they move in perfect symmetry around her like a kaleidoscope of upside-down Phillipas, long blond hair whirling about them as they clench their fists in frustration.

“It will grow easier with practice,” Mal says, soothing. Before she knows what she is doing she reaches to stroke that hair.

Phillipa jerks back, and Mal’s hand falls, bereft, to her side. All six of the reflections open their mouths in a silent scream and raise their right feet. When they come stomping down, the floor cracks in a perfect honeycomb web all around them.

***

He takes her wrist and kisses it. She may be imagining the soreness under the gentle pressure of his fingers, but wishful thinking or not it makes her breath come short. She pulls him to her, sliding her hand between the buttons of his shirt.

“Dom,” she says, and then for a time she says nothing of any importance, and she can believe they are truly present with one another, no real distance left at all.

But when she lies sleepy on the mattress, body worn with exertion and singing with accomplishment, Dom stroking her cheek, she finds herself saying, “My love, are you ready to meet Phillipa?”

His face for an instant shows a tenderness and joy so naked that it surprises her. And surely she has said exactly those words before, and surely he has looked down at her with just that expression—but when? Her arms ache suddenly with emptiness, and she cannot think why.

She sees in his eyes something of her own confusion. He pulls his hand back. “Not yet,” he says. “I’m sorry. Can you wait, Mal?”

 _Patience_ , she tells herself. She has used up a lifetime’s worth of it already, but for Dom she can always find a little more. “Three steps forward, one step back,” she says aloud.

“Two steps forward,” Dom corrects her, a smile at the corner of his mouth. She used, sometimes, to confuse her English idioms deliberately just to tease that smile from him.

Not this time, though. Mal blinks. “What did I say?”

***

Phillipa is improving, but she is not learning patience. Mal supposes this should not come as a surprise.

“I don’t want to forge _myself_ ,” she says. “And I don’t just want to do reflections, either. They’re like—shadow puppets. Useless.”

They are walking across the dreamscape, Mal in the lead. She knows the girl is just a few steps behind, not through the sound of her voice, not through any of the other senses she uses in the waking world. Instead, it is the way Phillipa’s feet disturb the surface of the ground Mal has placed beneath them, the catch of her lungs on the air Mal has created for their use.

“Very well,” she says. “Show me a different face.”

“Which one?”

She shrugs, keeps walking. “That is not important.”

At once she catches a glimpse out of the corner of her eye—a mane of long and lovely hair warmed by a light that does not exist in this grey and sunless place, a small form she wants instinctively to reach for, to hold to her side. The dreamscape slips around her. It takes a concentrated effort of will to steady it, and by the time she recovers the vision has faded.

“Oh,” Mal says to herself, beginning at last to understand. “Of course.”

***

“Do you remember the dreams?” she asks Dom. He just looks at her, waiting, a little wary—they both know he remembers too many of them. Mal clarifies. “The dreams we shared when we fell into Limbo.”

“I thought you died there, Mal. Of course I remember that dream.”

She shakes her head but does not ask again. The thought follows her into bed. They lie with the lights out and she listens to the soft sounds of his sleep, and she remembers that dream, too, the twisted falseness of it and the terrible relief of the fall, the wind whistling in her ears. But she turns to him and says into the dark, so quietly he can’t possibly hear, “Dom, I can’t remember how we got there.”

***

“I want you to meet my husband,” she says to Phillipa the next time they meet. She has not yet taken the PASIV out of its case, not yet reached for the cannulae.

“Fine,” Phillipa says. “If you want. Does _he_ want to?”

Mal looks across the table into a pair of eyes that shine with a challenge she has seen a hundred, a thousand times in Dom’s. Looks at the curve of a cheek so like her own. “It doesn’t matter,” she says. “He didn’t want to believe me the last time, either, but I was right. I think I can convince him now, though, because this time he will want to believe—but I think I will need your help.”

Those eyes grow hard, and the shoulders stiffen. “Believe you about what?”

“We were three levels down when we fell,” Mal says, very gently, as though soothing a child. _Our beautiful baby girl_. “It was his dream, that third level. He built it up so beautifully, he fell in love with it. Architects will do that.”

Phillipa makes as though to stand. Before she can push her chair back, Mal thrusts her hands out and pins her wrists to the table. The girl struggles, but Mal goes on, heedless, “It was the most difficult thing, clawing my way out, getting him to leave that dream. I have had to try so hard to show him we belong here. I’ve tried so hard, I convinced even myself, and I forgot how we arrived at that dream in the first place.” She stands, dragging Phillipa to her feet with impossible strength. She remembers now that the second level was Mal’s own dream. She can do with it what she likes. “We aren’t finished yet, are we?”

Phillipa stops struggling. Then she laughs, a wild childlike giggle. “Three steps forward, one step back. See if you can count better next time, _maman_.”

“It will grow easier with practice,” Mal says. “Come along, child. Let’s go talk to your father.”


End file.
